Sexual Assault and Testimony: Articulation of/as Violence

Abstract

Testifying to sexual assault can re-traumatize a victim-survivor. This article applies a psychoanalytic framework to existing debate to provide a new interpretation as to why this is still the case despite legal and policy reform. The trauma of testifying to sexual assault is located at the same site where a victim-survivor imagines the law understands and transforms an experience of sexual assault. The sexual assault victim-survivor’s testifying voice is both a medium for fantasy and a violent disruption to it, paradoxically constituting and imposing a violence to their subjectivity. Violence is inflicted through the testifying victim-survivor’s act of speaking, in directing their voice toward the law, and in the ideology associated with sexuality which coats voice and informs fantasy.